RSS Feed MenuTimed to coincide with President Obama’s jobs summit, Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich held a counter-summit in Cincinnati, Ohio yesterday, to be followed by another forum in Jackson, Mississippi today.
In Cincinnati, Gingrich opened his first “Real Jobs Summit” forum with remarks on his “Jobs First Plan”, the centerpiece of which is a two year, fifty-percent payroll tax holiday, to be paid for by unspent TARP and stimulus funds.
While President Obama’s beltway summit is exclusive to Fortune 500 CEOs, Nobel Prize Winners in Economics and union leaders, Newt Gingrich’s events are located in some of the areas hit hardest by America’s struggling economy and are open to anyone who wishes to attend. Ohio, where Gingrich’s first town hall was held, currently has a state-wide unemployment rate of ten percent.
In further contrast to President Obama’s more formal summit, Speaker Gingrich’s events have been designed to resemble town halls. After his remarks, Speaker Gingrich opened the floor to the over five hundred attendees who gathered to discuss the flailing American economy.
“We’re designed as a grassroots organization… the process is always one of listening. [Our organization] isn’t about going out and pushing something that everyone has to listen to us about. It’s not top-down,” said Vince Haley, Vice-President for Policy of American Solutions, where Gingrich is the general chairman.
Dan Kotman, a Gingrich spokesman, told FrumForum that they expect more than five hundred people at their Jackson, Mississippi event tonight, where Mr. Gingrich will be joined by Lt. Governor Phil Bryant.
Kotman also told FF that Gingrich and American Solutions are working on expanding the series of Jobs Summits, with more locations to be announced in the New Year.
If you want to catch Newt Gingrich’s ‘real job summit’ tonight in Jackson, Mississippi, it will be streamed live here from 5-7PM EST.
ottovbvs // Dec 4, 2009 at 2:19 pm
49 WillyP // Dec 4, 2009 at 2:04 pm
“You sit here and tell us how war enriches a population. It’s the oldest canard in the book. War impoverishes – guns or butter; not stones to bread.”
……..Willy….. the US emerged from both WW 1 and WW 2 enormously enriched……the same was true of the British at the end of the Napoleonic/French wars…….all involved copious public expenditures that were instrumental in propelling Britain and the US to the pinnacle of economic power …….now go away and look up determinist since you seem to like dictionary defs…….. and then pop along to Amazon and start looking for some titles that explain how wealth is actually created
ottovbvs // Dec 4, 2009 at 2:33 pm
49 WillyP // Dec 4, 2009 at 2:04 pm
“I want you to explain it to me in layman’s terms. ”
….since I haven’t the inclination to run 101 economic seminars for you at no charge …..right on cue Bruce Bartlett comes up with a sensible of description of how the stimulus is contributing to the recovery in employment……the bad news for you is that we’re only in the early stages of that multiplier effect
http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/03/tax-cuts-stimulus-jobs-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html
rbottoms // Dec 4, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Sarah Palin Hearts the Birthers, unemployment has peaked at just over 10% and is coming down.
That means BOHICA for the GOP in 2010 and 2012 boys and girls.
rbottoms // Dec 4, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Oh and 7,000 troops from NATO makes Afghanistan a net plus for the president. Pretty damn good and he hasn’t even been in office a full year yet.
Wait until the stimulus money actually starts getting spent next summer. With thousands back to work directly because of Obama, Bank of America’s billions in bailout money repaid, GM paying back the taxpayers, and the economy on the upswing the GOP is in serious trouble.
WillyP // Dec 4, 2009 at 2:58 pm
otto,
I do not need econ 101. I was schooled by a former Canadian central banker.
The multiplier effect is ludicrous. Which is why I ask you to explain it to me in your own words, so perhaps you can realize that you don’t fully understand it. Indeed, it’s incomprehensible.
ottovbvs // Dec 4, 2009 at 3:18 pm
55 WillyP // Dec 4, 2009 at 2:58 pm
“The multiplier effect is ludicrous”
……..Well I suppose it would be to someone who denies the existence of other well known economic phenomena like deflationary spirals, or the expansionary effect of public finance during WW 1 and 2 ………and you have obtained an economics degree during which a Canadian central banker denied the existence of defs, economic multipliers and the expansionary effect of wartime US public spending……if true, which I rather doubt, hopefully he’s a former Canadian central banker
WillyP // Dec 4, 2009 at 3:42 pm
no, the professor was very much a Keynesian. i happen to disagree.
You do not understand the concept of money, and it really that simple.
WillyP // Dec 4, 2009 at 4:00 pm
otto, you never answer a question. you defer to authority. instead of arguing with a close-minded quack, who attributes to his dissenters traits abundantly present in himself (hubris, pretension) i’m redirecting efforts to recruiting more conservatives. i would urge anyone else to ignore this cranky old man, atheist, keynesian, and liberal (all self-admitted, i might add.)
ottovbvs // Dec 4, 2009 at 4:12 pm
WillyP // Dec 4, 2009 at 3:42 pm
……..Willy……I don’t have an economics degree and since you didn’t reply in the affirmative I assume you don’t either……however, I have grad and masters degrees that contained economic components (most of the stuff I’ve forgotten to be honest)…….I’m certainly not a monetary expert but I know enough to get by and in broad terms I was a monetarist before you were born probably ……I’ve also had a lifetime of experience managing businesses in all sorts of economic environments…….believing in some aspects of monetarism, creative destruction, et al from the “Austrian” school is NOT incompatible with belief in mainstream Keynesian economics……you take a way too simplistic and absolutist a view which ignores reality and leads you into crankish denial of well proven theorems and events……I am not however a gold-bug (whose importance in modern monetary management you consistently overstate….Trichet doesn’t spend much time thinking about the price of gold)…….you are welcome to your beliefs but they are not material in any practical sense and I advise you not to make them the basis of an investment strategy……it’s as easy to lose money investing in gold as it is in equities or corporate debt
WillyP // Dec 4, 2009 at 4:18 pm
that’s great. i’m done with you. you’re boring.
ottovbvs // Dec 4, 2009 at 4:19 pm
WillyP // Dec 4, 2009 at 4:00 pm
“otto, you never answer a question. you defer to authority.”
………Willy dear boy……I’m not going to argue about whether the earth is flat………I’m satisfied with the body of authorative evidence that says it isn’t….ok
ottovbvs // Dec 4, 2009 at 4:42 pm
60 WillyP // Dec 4, 2009 at 4:18 pm
“that’s great. i’m done with you. you’re boring”
……aaahhh…..no I’m not or you wouldn’t have spent so much time fencing with me…..I linked to your site btw and assume you are the Willyp listed amongst the officers who posted a number of enlightening posts of which I read a few …..if I may say so you need to let some sunlight in at ny young republican central…..why not ask Bruce Bartlett to speak at one of your events…..ho.ho.ho.ho
sinz54 // Dec 6, 2009 at 7:19 pm
WillyP: “I would ask how government spending the public’s money can create a higher GDP? All the same bucket of water. CAN SOMEONE ANSWER THIS?!?!??!??!”
Because investment is NOT a zero-sum game. No matter who the investor is, the return on investment (if it’s the right investment) can exceed the cost by a wide margin.
You could ask the same thing about the great entrepreneurs: Marconi, Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, all needed financing and/or venture capital to get started. You could ask the same question: How does funding any of them from “the same bucket of water” produce a net benefit, when that’s money that had to come from elsewhere? The answer is that you were funding their innovations, which in the long run benefited far more than they cost.
What I think often gets forgotten is that the Government can innovate too. Not often.
But I can think of innovations in which the Government played a major role:
Interchangeable parts (Army contracts for mass-produced rifles in the early 19th century)
Settling the West (the Indian Wars, the Transcontinental Railroad)
RCA, the Radio Corporation of America (Started up by the Navy to get a homegrown supplier of radios)
The Panama Canal
LORAN navigation
Radar
Nuclear power
The Interstate highway system
Space satellites
Jet aircraft
The Internet (commercialized from the Pentagon’s ARPANET survivable network)
Don’t you agree that the benefits to America from each one of these far exceeded the cost to the taxpayer to pay for it?
While it’s politically incorrect, let’s face it: The white settlers (and newly freed blacks) who took Greeley’s advice and went West, developed the West to a much greater degree than the AmerIndians did. These settlers generated huge amounts of wealth from gold prospecting, farming, ranching, etc. Which ended up enriching all those other folks back East. But to do that, the U.S. Army had to get rid of the Indians first. And the Federal Government had to fund the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. All that came from taxpayer dollars.
sinz54 // Dec 6, 2009 at 7:23 pm
WillyP:
A couple more innovations that were driven by the U.S. effort in WW2 included stored-program computers and the mass production of penicillin.
Again, the taxpayers paid for these developments–but Americans have been repaid a hundredfold by these innovations.